Reading Comprehension Check

GENDER

Text 1.

Gender is the term used to describe socially constructed categories based on sex (sex refers to a biological distinction). Gender is a social construct. It is through concepts of gender that society transforms female and male human beings into social women and men, assigning them roles and giving them cultural value. Social norms construct and reinforce attitudes about women’s and men’s proper work roles, their participation in family and community life, modes of dress and demeanor and their appropriate styles of verbal behavior. Deborah Tannen, an American socio-linguist, says that “gender is the category that will not go away. We create masculinity and femininity in our ways of behaving, although while we believe that we are simply acting “naturally”. But our sense what is natural is different for women and men. And what we regard as naturally male and female is based on our stereotypes”.

Gender stereotypes are structured beliefs about the socio-psychological characteristics of women and men. People believe that men and women are substantially different on a number of characteristics. Men are considered to be higher in self-interest, women are considered to be higher in a concern for others. Men are forceful, adventurous, aggressive, self-confident, rude, independent, ambitious, active, dominant, and inventive. Women are affectionate, emotional, gentle, submissive, weak, appreciative, fickle, sensitive, nagging, and sentimental. Besides people prefer a boy as their firstborn child; people downgrade women’s achievements; people have negative opinions about women’s work capacities; women have been represented negatively in many areas, and women’s stereotypical characteristics are not as highly regarded as men’s are.

What is the nature of gender stereotypes?

The nature of gender preconceptions is deeply rooted into history – into the times and moral principles of a patriarchal society. The history of the humanity is the history of men. We know that in many cases women have been left out of history books because their work was confined to home and family. Since women were rarely taught to write, they could not write about their experiences. Women artists often expressed themselves in music, dance, and quilting. These are relatively fragile and anonymous art forms in contrast to the permanence of men’s art forms in painting, sculpture, and architecture. Although women have been invisible in history and in history books, philosophers throughout the centuries have commented upon women, in comparison to men. Their views make it clear that the devaluation of women is not a recent phenomenon. We accept assumptions about what is normal behavior for men and women without appreciating that many of these assumptions are centuries old. We have rejected the plumbing and heating standards that were normal a thousand years ago. However we have not rejected outdated notions regarding women, even though these notions were reactions to conditions that have long since passed.

Two important Greek philosophers, Aristotle and Plato, had contrasting ideas about genders.

Aristotle (384 – 322 B.C.) believed that women’s inferiority was biologically based. “We should look on the female,” he said, “as being as it were a deformity though one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature”. He believed that neither women nor children had fully developed rationality. Therefore, men must rule them both and be responsible for them.

Plato (427 – 347 B.C.) was Aristotle’s teacher. Unlike Aristotle and almost all of the well-known philosophers since then, Plato argued that rulers should be selected from carefully trained people, and these rulers might include women as well as men. He believed that women were generally less competent than men were. However, he maintained that some women are better than some men at any given activity. Thus, if a woman were particularly intelligent, courageous, and able to resist temptation, she could be a potential ruler.

Philosophers since the Greek period have usually expanded upon Aristotle’s view, rather than Plato’s. They argued that nature dictated that women should obey men; the function of women was to please men, to be useful to them, and to make their lives pleasant. They maintained that a man must conceive of a woman as a possession, as property that can be locked, as something predestined for service and achieving her perfection in that.

The historically formed gender preconceptions are portrayed in religion’s stories. Most religions include a description of how the world and its human occupants were created. For example, Jews, Christians, and Muslims share the story of Adam and Eve: God creates man “in his own image”. In other words, God is a man and men came first. Later God makes Eve as a companion to Adam, and she was constructed from his rib. Hence, women are made from men, and women are therefore secondary in the great scheme of things. Males are “normal” and females are “the second sex”, males are “norm” and women are “deviation from the norm”. Furthermore, Eve gives in to temptation and leads Adam into sin. Women, then, are morally weak, and this weakness can contaminate men. When Adam and Eve are expelled from paradise, their curse shows an interesting asymmetry. Adam’s curse is that he must work for a living, whereas Eve’s curse is that she must bear children in pain. Eve’s curse has two prescriptions for women: she must not seek employment, and childbirth must be unpleasant experience.

The New Testament expends upon the relationship between men and women: “For a man… is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man. … Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience… And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church (I, Corinthians, 11 – 14)”.

Thus women are represented as secondary, inferior, and weak. Each of these images of women emphasizes how women are different from men.

Gender differences are a topic of perennial interest but it is not generally understood that most gender differences are the result of social, not biological, pressures, and moreover our “common-sense” understanding of such differences is heavily influenced by the cultural myths we have all absorbed.

A myth is a story by which a culture explains or understands some aspect of reality or nature. Primitive myths are about life and death, men and gods, good and evil. Our sophisticated myths are about masculinity and femininity, and about the family. The main way myths work is to neutralize history. This points up the fact that myths are actually the product of a social class that has achieved dominance by a particular history. Myths mystify or obscure their origins and thus their political or social dimension.

There is a myth that women are “naturally” more nurturing and caring than men, and thus their natural place is in the home raising the children and looking after the husband, while he, equally “naturally”, of course, plays the role of a breadwinner. These roles then structure the most “natural” social unit of all – the family. By presenting these roles as part of nature, myth disguises their historical origin, which universalizes them and makes them appear not only unchangeable but also fair: it makes them appear to serve
the interests of the genders equally and thus hides the political effect.

The history that these myths turn into nature tells a very different story. The notions of masculinity and femininity were developed to serve the interests of bourgeois men in capitalism – they grew to make a particular sense of the social conditions produced by the nineteenth-century industrialization. This required working people to leave their traditional rural communities and move to the new cities, where they lived in houses and streets designed to accommodate as many people as cheaply as possible. The extended family and community relations of the traditional village were left behind and the nuclear family of a husband, a wife, and children was created. The conditions of factory work meant that children could not accompany their parents, as they could in agricultural work, and this, coupled with the absence of the extended family, meant that the women had to stay in the home while the men did the “real” work and earned the money. The myths of masculinity, femininity, and the family proliferated, but not randomly or naturally – they always served as the interests of the economic system and the class which it advantaged – middle-class men. This system required the nuclear family to be the “natural” basic social unit; it required femininity to acquire the “natural” meanings of nurturing, domesticity, sensitivity, of the need for protection, whereas masculinity was given meanings of strength, assertiveness, independence, and the ability to operate in public. For example, it seems natural, but is, in fact, historical, that men occupy an enormously disproportionate number of public positions in society.

Gender is also a psychological construct. All people are the same: we all eat and drink and sleep and cough and laugh, and often we eat and laugh at the same things. But in some ways, each person is different, and individuals’ differing wants and preferences may conflict with each other. Offered the same menu, people make different choices. And if there is a cake for dessert, there is a chance – one person may get a larger piece than another, and even greater chance that one will think the other’s piece is larger, whether it is or not.

Psychologists maintain that gender turns out to be one of the most important determinants of human behavior, and try to make sense of seemingly senseless misunderstandings that haunt men/women relationships. Psychologists’ data show: women tend to focus on intimacy and men on independence. Intimacy is key in a world of connection where individuals negotiate complex networks of friendship, minimize differences, try to reach consensus, and avoid the appearance of superiority, which would highlight differences. In a world of statuses, independence is key, because a primary means of establishing status is to tell others what to do, and taking orders is a marker of low status.

Though all humans need both intimacy and independence, women tend to focus on the first and men on the second. These differences can give women and men differing views of the same situation.

Reading Comprehension Check

1. What is the difference between the terms sex and gender?

2. How are men and women represented in history? What is a gender stereotype?

3. How did early philosophers portray genders? Are their views of the problem actual nowadays?

4. Do you agree with the religious view of the relationship between the opposite genders? Why?

5. Why were the concepts of masculinity and femininity developed? What do you think about proportional representation of genders in government?

6. Can you prove that women and men have differing views of the same situation? Why?

ASSIGNMENTS

1. Explain the terms: masculinity, femininity, preconceptions, status, to haunt, intimacy, independence, to proliferate, dimension, to point up, dominance, deformity, to reject, inferior, to expand upon.

2. Discuss the following:

1) Is gender equality possible? Is gender equality an “eternal problem”?

2) Who is responsible for violence against women and how to stop it?

3) Have you ever been discriminated against on the basis of your sex? What was the result?

4) What are some of the gender problems in this country? In the West? In the East?

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14